Marry Someone Who Will Fight Like HELL For You

We're all savage, self-centered animals when it comes to love. But that's not how it works.

Marry someone who will fight like hell for you. You might as well.

What's the alternative, honestly? You marry someone who doesn't have that much jab when it comes to standing up for you, when it comes to defending your honor or your name or whatever might be at stake when your ass is on the line?

What kind of marriage would that be? A marriage of convenience? Being married shouldn't be convenient. It should click, obviously, in at least half of the ways you sort of need it to click.

But convenience? Pfffft. Get real. You want a convenient, tidy little life? Pray that you come back as a golf ball or a walnut the next time around. Love is not convenient. Love is a goddamn hassle. But it's your hassle. It's both of your hassles. And it pays off in ways that far outshine the lonesome road if you really ever want it to.

Forever this. Forever that. There's so much forever talk when two people are planning on getting married and I only now realize just how damaging that mindeset was to my own marriage (now: failed marriage). I was clueless.

I figured that if we got married, that was it. She would support me through anything that could possibly arise. And I would do the same for her. I believed her when she told me as much, too. Because she wasn't lying. She would support me. And she did. But you can't hold a flawed blob of chaotic guts that is a human being to their wee promise of "forever." That's so ridiculous.

I didn't get it then. I didn't think two people like us could ever stray after all the hot forever smoke we'd blown into each other's eyes.

Know why? It's because I believed what I wanted to believe. I believed what was convenient for me to believe. I believed that our vows were essentially a prison sentence. We were cast out upon all of our tomorrows together because we'd exchanged a bunch of words that some wingnut dreamed up long ago in a feverish fit of Godness.

And all the taking for granted that you two do with each other — all that banking on the flimsy fact that he or she will be there in the morning, just like yesterday and the day before that, simply based upon everything up until now, on all of your blind faith in that one person will "have your back" no matter what, no matter when, no matter how — that is such utter and complete bullsh*t.

And quite frankly, I'm pleasantly surprised you two have even made it this far.

That's where things get all muffed up. So many of us stop believing in the reasons we started fighting for our partner in the first place. And usually that's because the "fighting for each other" — the tried and true honest, raw, exposed, I-will-take-a-bullet-for-you reality — has long since melted and congealed into some kind of prison yard wax weed pipe. You can get high off of it if you want. But it damn sure ain't like the old days.

That's critical to understand. It would be so cool if we could see that and know it during our first go-around with love. Or even our second or third go-arounds. That's rare, though. And understandably so.

The mere idea of being attached to someone else in the ways of marriage is so out there. Its very nature goes against our very nature. Born to survive, we volunteer to let someone else help us survive. Then, internally, we rise up in full riot-mode against that co-dependence.

So you need to marry someone who will fight for you. But you need to know that you need to maintain that burning desire to fight for them, too. Maybe even more. No, definitely more. That's the only way it can ever work.

They fight for you more than you fight for them. And you fight for them more than they fight for you. And you both fight yourselves like you were born to do. And as soon as one of those fights starts dying on the vine, you understand there's nothing you can do about it now.

If I'm scaring you or pissing you off, good. Who the f*ck is this dude to be giving me all this murky, badly-worded advice on fighting for the one I love? He doesn't know me. He doesn't know my wife or husband.

Fair enough. That's a question you have every right to ask yourself. Or me. But my answer is stout. Oh, my answer is as clear as the mountain stream trickling down across your beat-up mind. Because my answer is this:

I know that because I have watched it die in front of my eyes. I have driven a screwdriver through its blinking eye and I've held its quivering corpse in my arms night after night. I have stared down at the love I helped murder with my own two hands.

So to answer your question, I know a thing or two about how to kill your precious "forever." I know a thing or two about how to stop love cold.

All you have to do is marry someone who will fight like hell for you...and then give them one good reason to stop.